Fedora is back on Raspberry Pi with remix optimized for ARMv6

"Pidora" is a new build of Fedora for the Pi's ARM processor.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora operating system has a bit of a checkered history with the Raspberry Pi. It was originally the recommended operating system for the device before being stripped from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's downloads page, replaced by a version of Debian optimized for the Pi's ARMv6 chip.

But Fedora is back on the Pi in the form of a new build developed by the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. It's called "Pidora."

"It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set," the Pidora team said today.

The recommended OS for the Raspberry Pi these days is Raspbian, a version of Debian optimized for the ARMv6-based Broadcom BCM2835 chip's floating point unit, which as we've written is "important in robotics projects and various other types of math-intensive applications."

Pidora likewise takes advantage of the floating point unit in the Pi. Nearly all of the thousands of packages in the official Fedora repository were rebuilt for Pidora. Pidora also comes with C, Python, and Perl programming environments included on the SD card image.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation's downloads page still has just Raspbian, Arch Linux, and RISC OS. Pidora's makers say it will hit the official downloads page soon, but it is also already available from the Pidora website.

One of the issues with the Pi is that it runs the ARM6 core not the newer ARM7 core that everything else uses. The ARM6 core lacks a bunch of niceties that require changing defaults on kernel builds and recompiling lots of stuff.

Once the Pi gets some hardware acceleration in the traditional Linux stack (either X11 or Wayland), these distros will be a lot more enticing to me. There's no reason the Pi couldn't be a reasonably powerful computer for casual use; that is, office apps, web browsing, and some photo-editing. Not to mention most Linux desktop apps still have very low requirements for RAM and CPU power. Hardware acceleration would make Pidora downright pleasant.

Once the Pi gets some hardware acceleration in the traditional Linux stack (either X11 or Wayland), these distros will be a lot more enticing to me. There's no reason the Pi couldn't be a reasonably powerful computer for casual use; that is, office apps, web browsing, and some photo-editing. Not to mention most Linux desktop apps still have very low requirements for RAM and CPU power. Hardware acceleration would make Pidora downright pleasant.

Thats the ARMv6 vs ARMv7 problem , unless one of the PI project people do its not likely to make it in as ARMv6 is towards the end of its life.

For a arm desktop you'd be better off with a cortexA9 ,cortexA7 or A15 based board or one of qualcoms latest arm chips. eg odroid or similar. Some of the imx6(freescale dual/quad A9) boards are nice except let down by the sluggish graphics

Starting to see (but not released yet) arm board designs with sata 2 and usb3 some should be out around july/august

When you say "optimized for pi", do you really mean "compiled for pi" or "cobbled together for pi" or is there some actual optimization being done ?

These are the optimizations: gcc -march=armv6 -mcpu=arm1176jzf-s -O3 -funroll-loops

I did quite a few benchmarks on the gcc options for a Beagleboard XM. They do very little.

The problem with the pi is the software floating point. At this point in time, there are better boards than the pi for not much more. Check out the Allwinner on sparkfun.

As I understand it, the official Raspbian images are hard-float. Of course, that causes problems with Mono. There's a patch that someone lifted from someone (Sony?) but it's for an older version of Mono and the legality of the patch is suspect.

When you say "optimized for pi", do you really mean "compiled for pi" or "cobbled together for pi" or is there some actual optimization being done ?

These are the optimizations: gcc -march=armv6 -mcpu=arm1176jzf-s -O3 -funroll-loops

I did quite a few benchmarks on the gcc options for a Beagleboard XM. They do very little.

The problem with the pi is the software floating point. At this point in time, there are better boards than the pi for not much more. Check out the Allwinner on sparkfun.

As I understand it, the official Raspbian images are hard-float. Of course, that causes problems with Mono. There's a patch that someone lifted from someone (Sony?) but it's for an older version of Mono and the legality of the patch is suspect.

I'm not sure about that. For opensuse, hard and soft are different kernels.

When you say "optimized for pi", do you really mean "compiled for pi" or "cobbled together for pi" or is there some actual optimization being done ?

These are the optimizations: gcc -march=armv6 -mcpu=arm1176jzf-s -O3 -funroll-loops

I did quite a few benchmarks on the gcc options for a Beagleboard XM. They do very little.

The problem with the pi is the software floating point. At this point in time, there are better boards than the pi for not much more. Check out the Allwinner on sparkfun.

To be precise, the "problem" with Pi is that ARM11 distributions typically use software floating point (as that's the baseline for ARM11), while the chip in Pi does have a floating point coprocessor, which you need to take into account to fully utilize the HW.